I still collect action figures but every time I'm at Target or Toys r Us, somebody has bought up all the good action figures and sure enough they're on ebay at big markups. On my way to work I've seen people loitering around the parking lot at Toys 'r' Us waiting for them to open, bastards.
Public Relations is all about bias. You're paid to be biased and to spin things your employer's way. Indeed they are just doing their job, I assure you that Apple's PR people do the same thing. Tony Snow is paid to tell us that George Bush was not saying mission accomplished from the deck of the aircraft carrier (3/5th down) and he has to do it with a straight face. His job description didn't change much from his days at Fox.
But the point is, that's what PR is all about. If you don't want to have to lie for a living, then don't get into PR.
As lovely as these are, there's no way any real business is going to entrust their data into any of these. I can't imagine a merger deal on wall street being worked out using these tools.
Re:Exit Polls are Inaccurate
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
Is it possible that people who tend to vote democrat also tend to answer exit polling questions more that people who vote republican? I wouldn't be surprised, with the distrust of the media that the right wing radio nuts have instilled in a large segment of that voting bloc.
Likewise, if districts that used touchscreen machines had a discrepancy in the exit polls, whereby the exit polls showed a higher percentage of people who voted democrat, is it possible that this indicates that people not comfortable with computers were those same democrat voters that answered the exit poll questions, and messed up the vote they wanted to cast? The poor and uneducated, especially non-white folks, will often vote democrat thinking they'll get more entitlements. The white ones (uneducated and poor) tend to be religious and that bloc is pretty much owned by the republicans.
These divisions are somewhat new I think, with the rise of the radio nuts and all.
I'm shocked that the company hasn't yet started to fade or lose its reputation as a congregation of geniuses, given that with all the reqs they're having to fill, they're bound to be hiring in a less discriminate fashion than they used to. Those new lesser employees in turn conduct interviews, which begets another batch of lesser employees, until eventually you hire just about anybody with a CS degree. Meanwhile, your founding geniuses cash out their millions and go live in Hawaii, leaving their jobs to be filled by lesser talent. Ultimately this leveling of talent begins to show in the quality of your products, which in turn leads to a decline in your company's reputation, and before you know it Google is another bloated bug ridden software company that gets its daily dose of malignment on slashdot.
[1] To illustrate, consider age discrimination, which is Constitutionally required for certain political offices. Wouldn't you agree that it's a bit hypocritical for the government to forbit age discrimination to other employers while the practice remains one of its own fundamental employment rules?
Good example. What about when you're hiring a receptionist though? You want to present a certain image for your company when clients come to visit. In other words, you want someone attractive and reasonably young there and, oh yea, female. What if some fat disgusting old dude applies for the position with great office skills, can you turn him down and give the job to a dumb blonde instead?
Hrm... now there's an idea... gain 50 lbs, grow an unruly beard, skip a few showers, and then go interview for a receptionist job... I could retire with the dough I'd make on the lawsuit, cha-ching!!:)
I'm looking forward to when the Warren Commission's files on the JFK assassination are declassified. I hope to live till then, I believe it's sometime in the 2030's.
In Cuba they like to have these mock referendums where they ask people whether they want Fidel to remain in power or not. They usually get 100% positive responses. That kind of approval rating is directly proportional to the number of political dissidents in prison.
That's not fair. This person has presumably been punished for their crime(s) and paid their debt to society, it's unfair to blacklist him for the rest of his life.
I agree 100%, but for a woman, for some reason, how much you spend on the damn thing is more important than the thing itself. If it costs X*5, then it HAS to be 5x better, it's that much more significant to her. Ever hear of the "two months salary" rule for engagement rings? Any less is an insult for women heh. The last thing she wants to hear is how great a deal you got on something. You're better off going to a hoity toity jewelry store, buy the cheapest thing you can find just to get the nice little presentation box, and then put the fake diamond thing in there and give it to her. Heck, if you wanted to, you could even pull that trick buying the jewelry at K-Mart and put it in the nice box and boom, done, she'll think she has a really expensive piece of jewelry. Mind you, I've never done that since my girlfriend often needs to take it back to the store to have it adjusted, in which case I'd be a dead man. She's highly educated and really smart but yet she's into the shiny objects of value thang. Go figure. Great bribe if you're in the doghouse though. There's a logarithmic formula for how expensive the thing has to be for the severity of the offense. Didn't Kobe Bryant buy a ten million dollar shiny thing for his wife when it came out he screwed a crazy chick in CO?
What can I say, women like shiny objects. But then again, I buy action figures and put them on the shelf over my desk for display. Mine just cost a little less, and I'd be proud of my g/f if she got them at a discount:) Not that she'd ever buy me any, she barely tolerates it as it is.
I thought it was a sliding scale based on your income? And what? Only 30%?! I live in California, I pay 33% in federal taxes, 10% in state, and some in social security as well. I keep maybe half of my paycheck. Although I vote democrat most of the time, the one thing I did expect with a republican congress and president is that taxes would go down. tax cut? what tax cut?
The trouble with all of the semi-socialist countries in Europe is that all of the social services that have made them so attractive for so long are now buckling under the strain of un-restrained immigration, forcing the state to cut services and people to turn to privatized businesses. Welfare states where 70% of your income goes to taxes only works if it's a closed system.
A common strategy among people is to somehow refer to that very sane and logical conclusion as "racist". Uhhhh, ok.
Yeah, it's lovely in July and August but forget about it the rest of the year, brutally cold. I spent some weeks in Quebec City back and forth a few times, and it was freezing in June, amazing. It's the most beautiful city I have ever been to though, seriously, Napoleon's dream. I'd live there in a heartbeat if the weather were northern california-ish. I guess it helps that I speak French:) In Montreal you can get by with just English, but further north or east and you pretty much have to speak some French. Much nicer language anyway:)
My employer also thought it a nice joke to send me to New Brunswick for a few days in January once too, and I used to think Chicago was cold in the winter. Yikes! Where's that global warming I've been hearing so much about?:)
But seriously, free health care sounds great, until you actually need something. Need a knee surgery? Waiting list for five years. OR, if you have the cash, cross the border and have it done. The only reason Canada's system even half works is because the U.S. is next door to fulfill needs of that sort. I think I'll stay here for now. It sucks, but it sucks less than everywhere else.
Nowadays, you can't do anything without the possibility of somebody filming you with a cell phone camera. It won't be long before the technology is so cheap and so comoditized that every phone conversation you have is recorded and that every where you go in public is filmed and stored. Storage is so cheap now, it won't be long.
George Lucas is NOT part of Hollywood, he's always pissed them off and done things his own way. The big studios wanted to change all sorts of story elements in A New Hope, he said screw you and started his own studio. The screen actor's guild requires that all the actor's names and all that crap appear BEFORE the start of the movie, during the intro. Notice that Star Wars' credits come at the end (where they should be), Lucas paid all the fines for all the actors and staff as he kept it real. Oh, and btw, he split the profits big time with huge bonuses. And nevermind, too, that his company is up in San Francisco and is huge for the local economy, not in some Singaporian sweatshop and tax shelters. So you player haters just stfu, you jaded too-cool-to-care dumbass elitists too proud to admit you enjoyed the prequels, why did you pay to go see them if you had every intention of ripping them afterwards? The prequels were awesome. Plus people make it sound like he can't direct worth crap, well what about A New Hope? That movie is perfect, and everybody agrees with that, yea?
Consistent terminology is crucial to any field
on
Pluto Making a Comeback
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Oh but it is, it's very important. A precise terminology is critical to get anything done in any field.
Nostalgia or neat names your kids like are no reason to violate the rules of your field. AIDS was orginally categorized as a form of cancer, but then we found that it's not a cancer, so we stopped calling it a cancer. It's simple, really. Once you disprove something, it makes no sense to go on believing it.
The simple truth is that if you call Pluto a planet, then you also have to call Ceres and potentially hundreds of bodies in the Kuiper belt planets as well. Pluto does not dominate its orbit around the sun, it shares it with Charon, they spin around each other, one is not a moon of the other. None of the other planets in the solar system have such a symbiosis, they all have moons that orbit them. What shall we do when we manage to spot specific planetary bodies in distant solar systems? "let's see... hrm, that's a class-M planet, that's a gas giant, that's a dead rock, all of these have moons and they're spherical and dominate their orbits, but hey, here's a neat looking body there dancing with another body, I guess that's a planet too, let's call it Mickey and forget the thing it's spinning with." Where does it end? We need a concise definition that works every time, no exceptions.
As it is, with that gold disc in the voyager spacecrafts showing the planets of our system, it's doubtful ET will find us now since he'll see our system has only 8 planets but his directions said there would be 9. If he stumbles into the system anyway, and finds that's he's got the right place, he's going to think we're a bunch of retards for saying we have 9 planets:)
School should teach you theory, and test you on that theory using practical examples. The dumb kids should get filtered out and be taught practical skills. The smart ones can figure out the practical stuff when they graduate. No sense making kids waste their time for the sake of not making them feel bad. If they become smart later on they can still go to college and be just as, if not more, successful. It's better than having kids dropping out of school in frustration. This obsession with self-esteem is harmful to everybody.
I agree, however, you list these items in a linear fashion; unfortunately they are circular. You cannot have reliable food, water, and shelter without a stable government in place, and you can't have a stable government when the people are so desperately poor.
The thing about the so-called 3rd world is that they are no poorer or worse off today than they were before the disaster that was colonialism, but now they have something to compare to, and the divide grows wider and wider. Pre-colonial Africa was no paradise, they never had much land that was well suited for the domestication of crops, the local wildlife was not tameable and also not domesticable. The import of GM crops and livestock has helped, but food production in Africa remains substandard, the hunter & gatherer lifestyle still applies to many.
Without the ability to have your food resources all grown and provided by specialists (farmers), it's impossible to build up anything else. Making things worse, most of Africa has nothing to trade, save for cocoa, coffee, diamonds, and other precious metals used in electronics. And even worse, people in Africa are more concerned with maintaining the supremacy of their tribe than anything else, thus resulting in constant states of civil war. Increased life expectancy due to western medicine and remedies make for more misery, and now the plague of AIDS is devastating the continent.
How to fix Africa, that is really unsolvable until you can somehow get them to put their tribalism aside. Foreign aid helps a little bit, but most of it ends up in Swiss bank accounts belonging to corrupt heads of state. The west is criticized for not giving enough, but when only 15% of the aid money actually goes toward what it's supposed to, what's the point?
The best cooperation between the US/EU and Russia/China would be for the manned mission to Mars. One team could work on the whole getting there problem, another could work on living there for a few weeks or months, another on the actual scientific mission objectives, and yet another could work on the getting home problem. A very ambitious and way cool mission I hope to be alive to see.
The way to do it is to first launch a return vehicle to Mars and put it in orbit, ready and waiting for a crew to board it and use it to go home. You should also launch a habitation module / rocket to get to the orbiting return vehicle at that time, so that it's already there and intact by the time the astronauts arrive. This should include a rover vehicle, the habitation module, including water, food and oxygen / air, as well as all the scientific instruments and tools needed for the mission. Finally, once everything is in place, you can send your astronauts up and give them a few decks of cards to play with for 7 months while they get there.
Man I'd be all over that mission, glued to whatever site or channel is broadcasting every moment of it, now THAT is a reality show I'd like to watch.
Instead of hiring contracting firms to do it all behind the scenes, with a layer of bureaucrats between the programmers and the customer, why don't government agencies simply assemble their own teams of programmers with full-time jobs? It'd cost a helluvalot less, that's for sure, and you'd have tighter control too. They could just poach some project managers, systems analysts, and developers from top software companies, offering them market wages and benefits. I hate big contract firms with no transparency or accountability. The govt should sue the companies out of business. Those companies tend to have old dinosaurs more concerned with keeping their jobs than doing good work. Get some brilliant fresh grads from top schools too. Bah.
Back in my day, during the summer, the neighbourhood kids would all leave the house early in the morning (riding our bikes with no helmets) to go play with GIJoe or Star Wars figures in somebody's back yard, go to the comic book store (tended by an eerily similar fella as the one in The Simpsons), go play (and pirate) C64 games at somebody's house, and just be all over the place, including woods and construction sites and our parents had no idea where we were all day, nobody could reach us. Only rule is we'd have to be home by the time it was dark. I don't recall ever having someone we knew go missing or of anything awful happening to anybody, maybe we were just lucky (middle class suburbs of Chicago), but then again we weren't stupid either, we knew not to get into cars with strangers and what not. Anyway, those were the days, no worries, no responsibility, pure independence, all day.
Give a kid a cell phone and you make them trade that experience for your own peace of mind, all of a sudden you burden them with something there. It's tough though, if I were a parent I'd be too fretful to let my kids run about like I did. Parenting must be a totally different experience now with the internet and cell phones, you're not sure who your kids are associating with. At least back then our parents knew that were were only associating with other kids more or less our age, but with the net, dunno.
Slashdot Mirror
I still collect action figures but every time I'm at Target or Toys r Us, somebody has bought up all the good action figures and sure enough they're on ebay at big markups. On my way to work I've seen people loitering around the parking lot at Toys 'r' Us waiting for them to open, bastards.
Public Relations is all about bias. You're paid to be biased and to spin things your employer's way. Indeed they are just doing their job, I assure you that Apple's PR people do the same thing. Tony Snow is paid to tell us that George Bush was not saying mission accomplished from the deck of the aircraft carrier (3/5th down) and he has to do it with a straight face. His job description didn't change much from his days at Fox.
But the point is, that's what PR is all about. If you don't want to have to lie for a living, then don't get into PR.
It's Skynet, of course. Somebody get John Connor into hiding.
As lovely as these are, there's no way any real business is going to entrust their data into any of these. I can't imagine a merger deal on wall street being worked out using these tools.
Is it possible that people who tend to vote democrat also tend to answer exit polling questions more that people who vote republican? I wouldn't be surprised, with the distrust of the media that the right wing radio nuts have instilled in a large segment of that voting bloc.
Likewise, if districts that used touchscreen machines had a discrepancy in the exit polls, whereby the exit polls showed a higher percentage of people who voted democrat, is it possible that this indicates that people not comfortable with computers were those same democrat voters that answered the exit poll questions, and messed up the vote they wanted to cast? The poor and uneducated, especially non-white folks, will often vote democrat thinking they'll get more entitlements. The white ones (uneducated and poor) tend to be religious and that bloc is pretty much owned by the republicans.
These divisions are somewhat new I think, with the rise of the radio nuts and all.
I don't get that. You want a woman right? Above the age of 11?
I'm shocked that the company hasn't yet started to fade or lose its reputation as a congregation of geniuses, given that with all the reqs they're having to fill, they're bound to be hiring in a less discriminate fashion than they used to. Those new lesser employees in turn conduct interviews, which begets another batch of lesser employees, until eventually you hire just about anybody with a CS degree. Meanwhile, your founding geniuses cash out their millions and go live in Hawaii, leaving their jobs to be filled by lesser talent. Ultimately this leveling of talent begins to show in the quality of your products, which in turn leads to a decline in your company's reputation, and before you know it Google is another bloated bug ridden software company that gets its daily dose of malignment on slashdot.
[1] To illustrate, consider age discrimination, which is Constitutionally required for certain political offices. Wouldn't you agree that it's a bit hypocritical for the government to forbit age discrimination to other employers while the practice remains one of its own fundamental employment rules?
:)
Good example. What about when you're hiring a receptionist though? You want to present a certain image for your company when clients come to visit. In other words, you want someone attractive and reasonably young there and, oh yea, female. What if some fat disgusting old dude applies for the position with great office skills, can you turn him down and give the job to a dumb blonde instead?
Hrm... now there's an idea... gain 50 lbs, grow an unruly beard, skip a few showers, and then go interview for a receptionist job... I could retire with the dough I'd make on the lawsuit, cha-ching!!
I'm looking forward to when the Warren Commission's files on the JFK assassination are declassified. I hope to live till then, I believe it's sometime in the 2030's.
In Cuba they like to have these mock referendums where they ask people whether they want Fidel to remain in power or not. They usually get 100% positive responses. That kind of approval rating is directly proportional to the number of political dissidents in prison.
Putin's 80% is scary...
While it's a bit scary that they hired a criminal
That's not fair. This person has presumably been punished for their crime(s) and paid their debt to society, it's unfair to blacklist him for the rest of his life.
I agree 100%, but for a woman, for some reason, how much you spend on the damn thing is more important than the thing itself. If it costs X*5, then it HAS to be 5x better, it's that much more significant to her. Ever hear of the "two months salary" rule for engagement rings? Any less is an insult for women heh. The last thing she wants to hear is how great a deal you got on something. You're better off going to a hoity toity jewelry store, buy the cheapest thing you can find just to get the nice little presentation box, and then put the fake diamond thing in there and give it to her. Heck, if you wanted to, you could even pull that trick buying the jewelry at K-Mart and put it in the nice box and boom, done, she'll think she has a really expensive piece of jewelry. Mind you, I've never done that since my girlfriend often needs to take it back to the store to have it adjusted, in which case I'd be a dead man. She's highly educated and really smart but yet she's into the shiny objects of value thang. Go figure. Great bribe if you're in the doghouse though. There's a logarithmic formula for how expensive the thing has to be for the severity of the offense. Didn't Kobe Bryant buy a ten million dollar shiny thing for his wife when it came out he screwed a crazy chick in CO?
:) Not that she'd ever buy me any, she barely tolerates it as it is.
What can I say, women like shiny objects. But then again, I buy action figures and put them on the shelf over my desk for display. Mine just cost a little less, and I'd be proud of my g/f if she got them at a discount
I thought it was a sliding scale based on your income? And what? Only 30%?! I live in California, I pay 33% in federal taxes, 10% in state, and some in social security as well. I keep maybe half of my paycheck. Although I vote democrat most of the time, the one thing I did expect with a republican congress and president is that taxes would go down. tax cut? what tax cut?
The trouble with all of the semi-socialist countries in Europe is that all of the social services that have made them so attractive for so long are now buckling under the strain of un-restrained immigration, forcing the state to cut services and people to turn to privatized businesses. Welfare states where 70% of your income goes to taxes only works if it's a closed system.
A common strategy among people is to somehow refer to that very sane and logical conclusion as "racist". Uhhhh, ok.
Canada sounds like a nice place, though.
:) In Montreal you can get by with just English, but further north or east and you pretty much have to speak some French. Much nicer language anyway :)
:)
Yeah, it's lovely in July and August but forget about it the rest of the year, brutally cold. I spent some weeks in Quebec City back and forth a few times, and it was freezing in June, amazing. It's the most beautiful city I have ever been to though, seriously, Napoleon's dream. I'd live there in a heartbeat if the weather were northern california-ish. I guess it helps that I speak French
My employer also thought it a nice joke to send me to New Brunswick for a few days in January once too, and I used to think Chicago was cold in the winter. Yikes! Where's that global warming I've been hearing so much about?
But seriously, free health care sounds great, until you actually need something. Need a knee surgery? Waiting list for five years. OR, if you have the cash, cross the border and have it done. The only reason Canada's system even half works is because the U.S. is next door to fulfill needs of that sort. I think I'll stay here for now. It sucks, but it sucks less than everywhere else.
Nowadays, you can't do anything without the possibility of somebody filming you with a cell phone camera. It won't be long before the technology is so cheap and so comoditized that every phone conversation you have is recorded and that every where you go in public is filmed and stored. Storage is so cheap now, it won't be long.
Whew! The first movie sucked so bad, and I'm still mad at him for wrecking the "Aliens" franchise with that total crap "Alien Resurrection", blech.
George Lucas is NOT part of Hollywood, he's always pissed them off and done things his own way. The big studios wanted to change all sorts of story elements in A New Hope, he said screw you and started his own studio. The screen actor's guild requires that all the actor's names and all that crap appear BEFORE the start of the movie, during the intro. Notice that Star Wars' credits come at the end (where they should be), Lucas paid all the fines for all the actors and staff as he kept it real. Oh, and btw, he split the profits big time with huge bonuses. And nevermind, too, that his company is up in San Francisco and is huge for the local economy, not in some Singaporian sweatshop and tax shelters. So you player haters just stfu, you jaded too-cool-to-care dumbass elitists too proud to admit you enjoyed the prequels, why did you pay to go see them if you had every intention of ripping them afterwards? The prequels were awesome. Plus people make it sound like he can't direct worth crap, well what about A New Hope? That movie is perfect, and everybody agrees with that, yea?
Oh but it is, it's very important. A precise terminology is critical to get anything done in any field.
:)
Nostalgia or neat names your kids like are no reason to violate the rules of your field. AIDS was orginally categorized as a form of cancer, but then we found that it's not a cancer, so we stopped calling it a cancer. It's simple, really. Once you disprove something, it makes no sense to go on believing it.
The simple truth is that if you call Pluto a planet, then you also have to call Ceres and potentially hundreds of bodies in the Kuiper belt planets as well. Pluto does not dominate its orbit around the sun, it shares it with Charon, they spin around each other, one is not a moon of the other. None of the other planets in the solar system have such a symbiosis, they all have moons that orbit them. What shall we do when we manage to spot specific planetary bodies in distant solar systems? "let's see... hrm, that's a class-M planet, that's a gas giant, that's a dead rock, all of these have moons and they're spherical and dominate their orbits, but hey, here's a neat looking body there dancing with another body, I guess that's a planet too, let's call it Mickey and forget the thing it's spinning with." Where does it end? We need a concise definition that works every time, no exceptions.
As it is, with that gold disc in the voyager spacecrafts showing the planets of our system, it's doubtful ET will find us now since he'll see our system has only 8 planets but his directions said there would be 9. If he stumbles into the system anyway, and finds that's he's got the right place, he's going to think we're a bunch of retards for saying we have 9 planets
School should teach you theory, and test you on that theory using practical examples. The dumb kids should get filtered out and be taught practical skills. The smart ones can figure out the practical stuff when they graduate. No sense making kids waste their time for the sake of not making them feel bad. If they become smart later on they can still go to college and be just as, if not more, successful. It's better than having kids dropping out of school in frustration. This obsession with self-esteem is harmful to everybody.
Very underrated movie, it's hilarious. The part at the Medieval Times restaurant is amazing, as is the part with Owen Wilson.
My favourite line:
Wilson: "you're sexy"
Girl: "what?"
Wilson: "you heard me"
heh... Asian... they were speaking... Asian!!
I agree, however, you list these items in a linear fashion; unfortunately they are circular. You cannot have reliable food, water, and shelter without a stable government in place, and you can't have a stable government when the people are so desperately poor.
The thing about the so-called 3rd world is that they are no poorer or worse off today than they were before the disaster that was colonialism, but now they have something to compare to, and the divide grows wider and wider. Pre-colonial Africa was no paradise, they never had much land that was well suited for the domestication of crops, the local wildlife was not tameable and also not domesticable. The import of GM crops and livestock has helped, but food production in Africa remains substandard, the hunter & gatherer lifestyle still applies to many.
Without the ability to have your food resources all grown and provided by specialists (farmers), it's impossible to build up anything else. Making things worse, most of Africa has nothing to trade, save for cocoa, coffee, diamonds, and other precious metals used in electronics. And even worse, people in Africa are more concerned with maintaining the supremacy of their tribe than anything else, thus resulting in constant states of civil war. Increased life expectancy due to western medicine and remedies make for more misery, and now the plague of AIDS is devastating the continent.
How to fix Africa, that is really unsolvable until you can somehow get them to put their tribalism aside. Foreign aid helps a little bit, but most of it ends up in Swiss bank accounts belonging to corrupt heads of state. The west is criticized for not giving enough, but when only 15% of the aid money actually goes toward what it's supposed to, what's the point?
Ugh I'm depressed.
The best cooperation between the US/EU and Russia/China would be for the manned mission to Mars. One team could work on the whole getting there problem, another could work on living there for a few weeks or months, another on the actual scientific mission objectives, and yet another could work on the getting home problem. A very ambitious and way cool mission I hope to be alive to see.
The way to do it is to first launch a return vehicle to Mars and put it in orbit, ready and waiting for a crew to board it and use it to go home. You should also launch a habitation module / rocket to get to the orbiting return vehicle at that time, so that it's already there and intact by the time the astronauts arrive. This should include a rover vehicle, the habitation module, including water, food and oxygen / air, as well as all the scientific instruments and tools needed for the mission. Finally, once everything is in place, you can send your astronauts up and give them a few decks of cards to play with for 7 months while they get there.
Man I'd be all over that mission, glued to whatever site or channel is broadcasting every moment of it, now THAT is a reality show I'd like to watch.
Instead of hiring contracting firms to do it all behind the scenes, with a layer of bureaucrats between the programmers and the customer, why don't government agencies simply assemble their own teams of programmers with full-time jobs? It'd cost a helluvalot less, that's for sure, and you'd have tighter control too. They could just poach some project managers, systems analysts, and developers from top software companies, offering them market wages and benefits. I hate big contract firms with no transparency or accountability. The govt should sue the companies out of business. Those companies tend to have old dinosaurs more concerned with keeping their jobs than doing good work. Get some brilliant fresh grads from top schools too. Bah.
Back in my day, during the summer, the neighbourhood kids would all leave the house early in the morning (riding our bikes with no helmets) to go play with GIJoe or Star Wars figures in somebody's back yard, go to the comic book store (tended by an eerily similar fella as the one in The Simpsons), go play (and pirate) C64 games at somebody's house, and just be all over the place, including woods and construction sites and our parents had no idea where we were all day, nobody could reach us. Only rule is we'd have to be home by the time it was dark. I don't recall ever having someone we knew go missing or of anything awful happening to anybody, maybe we were just lucky (middle class suburbs of Chicago), but then again we weren't stupid either, we knew not to get into cars with strangers and what not. Anyway, those were the days, no worries, no responsibility, pure independence, all day.
Give a kid a cell phone and you make them trade that experience for your own peace of mind, all of a sudden you burden them with something there. It's tough though, if I were a parent I'd be too fretful to let my kids run about like I did. Parenting must be a totally different experience now with the internet and cell phones, you're not sure who your kids are associating with. At least back then our parents knew that were were only associating with other kids more or less our age, but with the net, dunno.